2011 will be the year Android explodes — (Not this kind of smartphone growth.) Image by @boetter via Flickr — Ever-improving networks and a big hardware announcement that will send handset prices plummeting both point to smartphone growth in 2011 that could totally eclipse anything we've seen before.

Leo Laporte Builds Empire With ‘This Week in Tech’ — Balancing on a giant rubber ball in a broadcast studio and control room carved out of a cottage in Petaluma, Calif., Leo Laporte is an unlikely media mogul. — From that little town in California wine country, he runs his empire, a podcasting network, TWIT.

Is Quora the biggest blogging innovation in 10 years? — I've now been blogging for 10 years. Looking back we haven't seen all that much innovation for bloggers. You have a box. You type in it. Put an image into it. And hit publish. That's much the same as the tools I had 10 years ago.

The Top 40 iPhone Apps of 2010 — Editor's note: This guest post is written by Alex Ahlund, the former CEO and founder of AppVee and AndroidApps, which were acquired by mobile application directory Appolicious. You can read his previous iPhone app picks here and here — The iTunes App Store is huge.

Man quits job, makes living suing e-mail spammers — SAN FRANCISCO - Daniel Balsam hates spam. Most everybody does, of course. But he has acted on his hate as few have, going far beyond simply hitting the delete button. He sues them. — Eight years ago, Balsam was working as a marketer …

UWall.Tv Turns YouTube Into Your Own MTV — Frustrated with how difficult it is to search YouTube for music videos, Argentinian web developer and Taggify.net co-founder Sebastian Vaggi has created UWall.tv. UWall.tv allows you to search YouTube by artist, song or by music category like Vevo …

Twitter has a lot to prove in 2011 — Twitter Inc. gained more than 100 million registered members this year and approached the new year with a fresh investment of $200 million. — Now the San Francisco firm must prove it can live up to its newly elevated valuation of $3.7 billion.

The Unwelcome Return of Platform Dependencies — Editor's Note: The following guest post is written by a Silicon Valley CEO. Frank Dupree is a pen name — In the late 1990s, the rise of the browser was supposed to usher in an era of unprecedented opportunity for startups.

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